01 April 2012

Review: The Dark and Hollow Places

The Forest of Hands and Teeth is a great book on all counts. Big fan as a whole. The Dead-Tossed Waves was a solid, although flawed, follow up. This book, unfortunately, feels like it betrayed the good qualities of what came before it by featuring a somewhat pathetic protagonist combined with a love story that ultimately felt shoehorned in and Twilight-esque in its plotting. While complaining about reality in a zombie novel is ultimately futile, at least the first two books felt realistic, while this went off the rails in a hurry.

I think the main problem is not the author or the writing, as both were fine on a whole. I think the problem is more that the concept lent itself to a very cool, concise single volume book that didn't really need further exposition, and each piece added to the story subtracted from the whole. Plenty of long-standing stories with multiple volumes run into this in various degrees, but this felt significant.

Unfortunate. I know the series has been described as a trilogy, and I do hope it's done.